Indian BPO industry to hold convention in US with aim to change perception of sector

No one is expecting large deals, but companies believe it will help change the perception of the sector as a voice-dominated business.

MUMBAI: "We really take a little bit of offense to the term call centre," David Mackey, senior vice president of finance at business process outsourcing firm WNS, had said at an earnings call last month.

The entire Indian BPO industry is saying the same thing. It's leaving no stone unturned to change the impression that taking calls from angry customers is its main business.

At the end of March, the Indian BPO industry will hold its first convention in the United States, its largest market. No one is expecting large deals, but companies believe it will help change the perception of the sector as a voice-dominated business that has lost ground to the Philippines. "We want to go and say India is a best place for BPO," said Sandip Sen, CEO of Essar's Aegis BPO. "If you want analytics and finance and accounting, we have one of the largest talent pools in the world. Our employees are world-worthy. And if you want voice and chat and email customer support, we offer you unmatched scale," he told ET.

Sen said the industry targets to bring 100 clients to the event.

The industry is looking to change its image not just among clients but among potential employees as well.

Experts say that customer service or the contact centre is just 40% of the overall BPO spend pie. But in trying to grab a larger share of the non-voice and higher margin business, Indian companies need to attract the kind of talent that has shunned them for being "call centres".

For the first time in its decades-long existence, the industry has hired advertising agency JWT to change its perception among students.

"Our rebranding team has gone to two Bengaluru colleges so far, and the response is encouraging," K S Viswanathan, vice president at Nasscom, said. "We are telling the students that there is so much more to the industry, so many career opportunities," he said.

Companies are also sponsoring their own analytics-MBA degrees.

WNS recently announced a joint MBA programme in business analytics with NIIT University in Delhi. The program will begin in June 2016 and is expected to create a supply of focused analytics experts and also "help improve the WNS brand in India".

Sen of Aegis BPO said it was no longer accurate to think of India as a less attractive place to do customer support BPO. "It is no longer only voice. So much more is done on chat, on email, on social media. So that accent and culture issue that people kept talking about is no longer so big," he said.

The Philippines, which has had a large US presence on its soil, is often considered more culturally attuned to the US market, and has taken away some market share from India.

Indian IT companies have often talked about taking steps to grow their higher-margin businesses, but now the investments they are making are mostly narrowing their margins.

"WNS expects its adjusted operating margin to decline to the 'high teens' over the next two-three years. It was 22.1% in Q3," John O' Brien, analyst with the UK TechMarketView, said in a note. "CFO Sanjay Puria put this down to the need to invest in areas like digital, analytics and more technology enablement," he said.

For Genpact, India's largest standalone BPO provider, consulting, reengineering, data science and analytics practices with new digital tools and platforms generated approximately 17% of its revenues in 2015.

To put that into perspective, Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT services company, derived 13.7% of its revenue from digital offerings in its latest quarter.

Genpact is looking at more ways, including acquisitions, to bring in automation.

"We entered into eight strategic partnerships to embed technologies such as cognitive intelligence, machine learning and robotic automation into our solutions. We believe a combination of organic and inorganic investments and partnership related development will be the most effective route to accelerate the deployment of these disruptive solutions," Tiger Tyagarajan, CEO of Genpact, told analysts recently.